Steemit: Towards an integrated proofreading and editing market.

Many people (I among them) find it hard to write quality posts simply because #English is not our mother tongue. No matter how good the content is, grammatical glitches and unnatural expressions turn readers off.
Right now, the best solution is to purchase #proofreading services from a professional, either a freelancer or a company. A couple of things, however, may prove off-putting for casual writers:

You have to jump through a lot of hoops to publish a proofread post

If I wanted to write, proofread and publish a piece on Medium, I would have to take the following steps:

• write the article in a text editor such as notepad
• upload the text to the proofreading platform
• use instant messaging or email to communicate with the editor during the proofreading
• use PayPal or credit card to pay
• publish on Medium

This is a total of 5 different applications/services that Steemit could replace altogether, with just a few adjustments, such as by adding a special field to allow posts to be marked “for proofreading”. Posts marked this way would be published first on a private feed, visible only to a group of accounts flagged as “proofreaders”, while still hitting the blockchain to protect writers from plagiarism. Then, after the proofreading is done, the writer would unmark the article to make it visible on the main steemit feed.
From what I can tell a messaging system will be implemented some time down the road so the communication aspect is covered as well.

Most proofreaders charge by the word or by the hour, so the cost can add up pretty quickly

Fortunately steem can leverage smart contracts to allow for more sophisticated billing methods.
One such method could be for the proofreader to ask for a percentage of the post’s profits. This would not only attract professionals and create a very competitive market but also force editors to view clients as partners and work toward a shared goal.

Increasing the pool of writers that can easily produce native-like posts will boost the number of quality posts and give steemit a huge advantage over similar platforms. And I’m convinced that this is only one of the many ways in which the Steem blockchain can be used to create meta services around content. After all, unlike other #blockchain systems, content is the heart of steem.